Friday 18th January, 2013
A good day's sailing today, with a hint of sun and a patch of bue sky early on giving way to grey clouds and gusty conditions for the rest of the day.... meaning that at times we went pretty fast in the gusts, but just staying within reasonable bounds! The wind has been WNW all day, varying just alittle -whichmesnt that our course wigled slightly... but I was able to head us due East for quite a time with a nice current giving a boost for a bit - gaining time and distance compared with going the same distance at a lesser latitude further North! There's a Low forecast for later next week that might well make me want to head further N to avoid the worst of it - I'll be keeping an eye on that very soon.
Seas stayed up around 4m or so and so, with the quite rough conditions, in came the birds! They always enjoy the stronger conditions & loved it, swooping around the boat most of the day! A good flock of some 25 handsomely-marked Antarctic prions arrived later this afternoon, with a Royal and a Wandering albatross coming by at different times earier and a few white-chinned petrels present all daylong. (all-dark, except for yellow bill, often with a patch of white at its base - although not in these birds) . Our 'resident' storm petrels weren't to be seen.
I made my regular contact with both Wolfgang on the Patagonia Net and with Graham, ZS2ABK, on the South African Maritime Mobile Net (S.A.M.M. Net) in the morning. Wolfgang is off to the mountains over this weekend - the Andes are so very close everywhere in Chile!
I'm hurrying to finish this and 'post' it while radio contact is OK - it's getting difficult now with very small 'windows' when I can make the radio connection needed to send and receive the emails... which includes my weather info - I just downloaded the latest grib files and weather info so need also to have a good look at those.
The wind has dropped (boatspeed is down to 4.5 kt from the 6kt of earlier) and I can hear the rain coming down now ....no moon tonight!
24hr DMG at 8pm local time (2300GMT ): 136 n.mll. Cape Horn 1136 n.ml. away (SW). E. Falkland: 732 n.ml. (WSW), S. Georgia: 449 n.ml. (SSE). Cape Agulhas (southernmost Cape of Africa) 2770 n.ml.
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For my positions, see:
www.svnereida.com - 'Travels' - "Where is 'Nereida'?"
http://www.exactearth.com/media-centre/recent-ship-tracks/tracking-nereida/